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Why Twitter Is the Future of News

An unprecedented analysis reveals that the micro-blogging service is remarkably effective at spreading “important” information.

April 30, 2010

It’s basically impossible for a
journalist who relies on Twitter to find stories, stalk editors, rack up “whuffie” and beef with rap
stars
to be objective about the service.

Fortunately, I don’t have to be, because
four researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology have performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter. They
conclude that it’s a surprisingly interconnected network and an effective way
to filter quality information.

In a move unprecedented in the history of
academic research on Demi Moore’s chosen medium for feuding with Kim
Kardashian,
Kwak et al. built an array of 20 PCs to slurp down the entire contents of Twitter over the course of a month. If you were
on Twitter in July 2009, you participated in their experiment.

This “retweet tree analysis” shows instances of retweeting. When a message is retweeted just a few times it reaches a huge number of users. Credit: Kwak et al.

Four Degrees of Separation

The ideas behind Stanley Milgram’s
original “six degrees of separation” experiment, which suggested that
any two people on earth could be connected by at most six hops from one
acquaintance to the next, have been widely applied to online social networks.

On the MSN messenger network of 180
million users, for example, the median degree of
separation is 6.
On Twitter, Kwak et al. hypothesized that because only 22.1% of links are
reciprocal (that is, I follow you, and you follow me as well) the number of
degrees separating users would be longer. In fact, the average path length on
Twitter is 4.12.

What’s more, because 94% of the users on
Twitter are fewer than five degrees of separation from one another, it’s likely
that the distance between any random Joe or Jane and say, Bill Gates, is even shorter on Twitter than in real
life.

Information as Outbreak

“…No matter how many followers a
user has, the tweet is likely to reach [an audience of a certain size] once the
user’s tweet starts spreading via retweets,” says Kwak et al. “That
is, the mechanism of retweet has given every user the power to spread
information broadly […] Individual users have the power to dictate which
information is important and should spread by the form of retweet […] In a way
we are witnessing the emergence of collective intelligence.”

If this reminds of you early 90’s
hyperbole about the then-new world wide web, it should! Back then the web was a
raucous, disorganized, largely volunteer-led effort full of surprisingly
informative Geocities pages and equally uninformative corporate websites.

These days we have to contend with the
creeping power of what can only notionally be defined as media “content”–produced
purely to appear at the top of search results. But it appears that the (so far)
still entirely human-filtered paradise of Twitter may come to the rescue. Owing
to the short path length between any two users, news travels fast in the
tweet-o-sphere.

Earlier work suggested that the best
way to get noticed on Twitter was to tweet at certain times of day, and Kwak et
al.’s paper sheds some light on why this is the case: “Half of retweeting
occurs within an hour, and 75% under a day.” And it’s those initial
re-tweets that make all the difference: “What is interesting is from the
second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source
are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to 5 hops
away.”

There Are a Lot of Lonely People on
Twitter

Clashing with the service’s
interconnectivity, Kwak et al.’s analysis also suggests that there are a lot of
lonely people on Twitter, and not just the ones who are tweeting angry
political screeds at 8 pm on a Saturday night. “67.6% of users are not
followed by any of their followings in Twitter,” they report. “We
conjecture that for these users Twitter is rather a source of information than
a social networking site.”

Another possibility, left unexplored by
Kwak and his colleagues, is simply that on Twitter, like real life, some people
are much more popular than others.

Aside from its monkey + keyboard
simplicity, the fact that links on Twitter do not have to be reciprocal may be
its ultimate genius. To that end, I urge all of you to follow Technology Review on Twitter. I must warn you
that, as an enormously influential inanimate object, it has no empathy or
conscience, so don’t take it personally when it doesn’t follow you back.

Become an MIT Technology Review Insider for in-depth analysis and unparalleled perspective.

Christopher Mims was a contributing editor at MIT Technology Review between 2011 and 2012. Before that, he blogged about the converging crises of the 21st century for Grist. He… More has also reported for Wired and Scientific American, and worked on various projects for the BBC, The Atlantic and Smithsonian.

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